Publications Based on SOEP Data: SOEPlit

Explaining Gender Convergence in Housework Time: Evidence from a Cohort-Sequence Design

This study connects two lines of research—trend studies on social change in housework time and life-course studies on individual- and couple-level change in housework time. This novel approach allowed us to link the macro-level trend of gender convergence in housework time to the micro-level mechanisms underlying it. Using long-running panel data (SOEP), we implemented a cohort-sequence design that ...

New evidence on the relationship between risk attitudes and self-employment

This paper analyses the impact of risk attitudes on the decision to become selfemployed among individuals who grew up under the communist regime in Ukraine, which banned self-employment so that individuals could not observe what it is like to be self-employed. Since the intra-family transmission of self-employment experiences was largely shut down, the observed correlation between risk preferences ...

Cross National Patterns of Retirement and Poverty Among Men and Women in the 1980s: Full Stop or Gradual Withdrawal?

U.S. Poverty and Income Security Policy in a Cross National Perspective

Why the U.S. Antipoverty System Doesn't Work Very Well

Transitioning Towards More Equality? Wealth Gender Differences and the Changing Role of Explanatory Factors over Time

The objective of the study is to investigate the changing role of explanatory factors of wealth and the gender wealth gap in Germany over the period 2002-2012 using individual level microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The authors apply distributional decomposition methods and focus on the role of changes in labor supply, permanent income, portfolio composition, and marital status in this ...

The Luxembourg Wealth Study - A cross-country comparable database for household wealth research

The paper describes the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS), an international project launched in 2003 by the Luxembourg Income Study and by institutions from Canada, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The aim of the project is to assemble and to harmonise existing micro-data on household wealth, in order to provide a sounder basis for comparative ...

Cross-National Comparison of Income and Wealth Status in Retirement: First Results From the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS)

This paper provides a first glance at the role of income and wealth in comparing economic security of older persons in the United States in cross-national perspective. We compare our elders to those in six other rich OECD countries (Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). These countries have diverse social policy systems, with respect to both social insurance and public assistance; ...

To own or not to own? Household portfolios, demographics and institutions in a cross-national perspective

Using harmonized wealth data and a novel decomposition approach, we show that cohort effects exist in the income profiles of asset and debt portfolios for a sample of European countries, the U.S. and Canada. We find that younger households’ participation decisions in assets are more responsive to income than older households. Family structure plays a significant role in explaining cross-country differences ...

Examining the gender wealth gap in Germany

Economic research on the determinants of gender differences in economic outcomes particularly in income and consumption is well established. Extending these investigations to other outcomes such as wealth up till now has been limited due to lack of individual-level data. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we find a significant ‘raw’ gender wealth gap of 50,000€ for married partners. Decomposition ...